AlexB

My short story Sui Generis is available on Amazon shorturl.at/akotx.

He stood atop a massive cliff overlooking a vast, shimmering sea that seemed to stretch forever. The sky was a swirling canvas of colors—gold, violet, and emerald—illuminated by twin suns that hung low on the horizon.

There was a peculiar comfort in the ruins—a promise of renewal, of regrowth in its most primal form.

Illian wrestled with uncertainty. The blue flowers, arranged with almost mystical precision, whispered of hidden symbology, of cryptic meaning too elusive to grasp fully. It overwhelmed him, even as a scholar, to decipher the chaos of the pilgrimage. More and more people flooded in, forming cliques, tribes, alliances. Along the journey, friendships were forged, enemies made, and some even perished on the road. The pilgrimage drew all manner of souls—those seeking purpose, those fleeing it, and those pursuing something darker. Amid the throngs, alliances were born, love bloomed, while betrayals and cruelty festered in the same breath.

He turned back toward the city, the day's absurd labors calling him home. But in his pocket, his hand closed around a crumpled note from last night's dream - a fragment of hope scrawled in haste.

In the heart of the cosmic abyss, where colossal gears of creation clash against the gossamer veil of ether, Omphalos pulses as the eternal navel of all being—a mesmerizing entity that blurs the line between ancient machine and veiled deity, perhaps hammered from the fiery anvil of quantum chaos or breathed into form by the murmuring shadows of long-lost gods.

Under each lamp post, a pale yellow orb of light bloomed into being. The dance between light and darkness held me captive. At last, I left the brick wall behind and began walking down the promenade, drawn forward by that chain of trembling glow.

She sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, head tilted back as if in meditation. Thin cables snaked from her temples, plugged into a jury-rigged console that hummed with a life of its own. Her chest rose and fell, slow and steady, but her skin was pale, almost translucent, veins glowing faintly beneath the surface. Not dead. Not alive, either. Something in between—a sleeper caught in a dream she couldn’t escape.

Either way, the house was warming. And for the first time in weeks, the thought of tomorrow - tinkering or not - didn’t feel quite so weightless. He sat back down in the armchair, closed his eyes, and waited to see what the subconscious would serve up tonight. Deviant, conjurer, or merciful blank screen. For now, the day had already offered its small, unasked-for complication. And he was, against his better judgment, mildly curious what it might do next.

Their minds had brushed against each other earlier when Illian first entered the ruins, but the connection then had been fleeting, uncertain. Now, he could sense the full strangeness of the entity before him, an enigma that defied the knowledge he had gathered. Its form rippled and shifted, a kaleidoscope of peacock tails, wings of angels, and flames in all imaginable colors. Each part of its body seemed in flux, as if constantly shedding one disguise for another, or perhaps embodying change itself. It was unlike anything he had ever encountered—unmatched, unseen, unrepeatable.

A pigeon landed on the railing. It regarded him with one black eye, head cocked the way pigeons do, except this one didn’t blink. Ever. After ten full seconds it opened its beak and a voice came out—his own voice, recorded and played backwards. “Seven doors,” it croaked. “One week. Choose badly and the year eats itself.” Then it exploded into ordinary feathers and flew away.

Hours passed, or perhaps seconds. Time was a suggestion, not a law. The patterns intensified, a crescendo of light and sound that threatened to unravel their minds. Then, abruptly, silence.

He thought about calling the repairman. The number was pinned to the fridge under a magnet shaped like a grinning tomato. He imagined the conversation: polite frustration on both ends, promises of arrival windows that would stretch like taffy. Then the bill—another small extraction from the vein of his quiet life. The thought exhausted him before he even dialed.Instead, he poured another cup of coffee and carried it to the armchair by the window. The leather creaked under his weight, a familiar complaint. He sipped slowly, letting the bitterness bloom across his tongue. Caffeine was honest, at least. It didn’t pretend to be anything other than a chemical handshake with the nervous system.

Inside, faces wore masks of wariness—engineers, maintenance crews, researchers tethered to the Net. The central elevator loomed, a sleek tube of concentric cabins spiraling upward like a stretched vein. I stepped into one, and it shot me skyward, the abyss of the building swallowing me whole.

The stone labyrinths stretched endlessly, their secrets woven through corridors that twisted and bent like ancient arks. These multi-leveled, multidimensional structures lay beyond the grasp of common intellect, carefully concealed from the world for eons. Grand and isolated, they were both forbidden and forgotten, a silent testament to times long past.

Half an hour in, I found her trace—a silver-threaded bracelet, its glow fading as I touched it. A Net tether, discarded. Why here? What drew a Net-born kid to this tomb?

She smirked, leaning forward, elbows on the table. “You’re no fool, Hudson. Crazy, yeah. Strung out, sure. But you see it—the grease under the gears, the skunks pulling levers. Most folks don’t. They just choke on the juice and call it life.”

Time alone held the wall that shielded us—for now. Then there were those other fools, aware of humanity’s urgent need to grow, yet lulled by the illusion of abundant hours. They idled, trusting future generations to unravel the crisis, as if tomorrow’s children could bear the burden alone. Such a stance was not just suicidal—it was loveless. To ignore the next generation was to forget they are shaped by us, molded in the crucible of our actions.

The waves I’d heard faded, replaced by a sweeter silence—the soundlessness of the cosmos. It enveloped me, threading through every fiber, as if I’d been granted a sixth sense, a tether to the infinite. Phantom melodies danced at the edges of my mind—echoes of a life well-heard—before I let them go. I stepped into the void, weightless, and plunged into the endless expanse.

No entrance announced itself. No doors. Only the slow, hypnotic gyre of shells, each rotation a question phrased in mathematics older than galaxies.

Argyre was humanity’s gamble—a self-sustaining outpost meant to outlast Earth’s spiraling descent into nuclear brinkmanship. But beneath its gleaming habs and hydroponic gardens, secrets festered, and the Face watched, unblinking.